Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
And then it fucking charges.
The horse drops its head and comes down the slope at me, the size of it fills the whole sky. the hooves loud on the turning ground, and I have just enough time to understand that I am going to die, that I have put myself in front of a monster that is going to run me into the dirt, and I manage to throw myself sideways, into the gorse.
It doesn’t hit me.
It checks, pulls up short three feet from where I was, the great white body wheeling while it lets out a loud whinny, and I understand, even as I’m sprawled in the gorse with the breath knocked out of me, that it was never going to hit me. It simply moved me out of the way, the way you’d move a dog out of a doorway with your foot. It wanted me out from in front of the thing it came for.
Now I am out of the way, and Sinclair has stumbled back toward his car at the shock of it. The horse stands between us, breathing wet clouds from his nostrils, and I’m pretty sure it’s already forgotten I exist.
And Sinclair—Sinclair, who grew up with Highland ponies, who just watched a half-wild animal nearly trample his witness—goes to the boot of his car, pops the trunk, and takes out a coil of blue nylon rope.
“No,” I whimper from the gorse, “no, no, no, don’t—”
“It’s spooked, that’s all,” he says in a soothing, competent voice, looping the rope in his hands. “A loose animal like this’ll do somebody harm if it’s left. I’ll get a line on it and we’ll ring round, find who’s missing a horse.” He’s moving toward it slow now, the rope held low and easy, his voice murmuring there now, there, easy, easy. The horse stands and lets him come.
Of course it lets him come.
I get up out of the gorse. My palms are bleeding from the fall, my slippers half on, and I’m screaming now. “It’s not a horse! Detective, it is not a horse, it’ll kill you, please, please get away from it—”
He doesn’t even look at me.
The glamour has him all the way now. He reaches the horse. He lays his free hand flat on the slope of its shoulder, the way you gentle a horse before the rope, that broad confident pat, there now—
…and his hand doesn’t come off.
I see the exact moment it goes wrong, and his face changes. He tries to lift his palm to bring the rope up over the neck, but his hand stays where it is—fixed to the wet shoulder like it’s been set in concrete. Incredulous, he starts, “What the f—”
The horse rears.
It goes up, up, Sinclair’s stuck arm wrenching up with it so his whole body is hauled off the ground. For one frozen second he hangs there, his trapped hand against the rising bulk of it, and then the hooves come down.
The first one catches him low, between the legs, and the sound he makes is one that will stay in the marrow of my bones until I die. The second comes down on his shoulder and I hear it break, a wet wooden crack, the joint going the wrong way. He screams. He’s still alive, and he’s screaming, and his hand is still stuck. The third hoof comes down somewhere in the soft middle of him, and the scream changes pitch into something that isn’t human anymore.
He’s not dead. That’s the fucking horror of it all: it hasn’t killed him. It’s broken him, methodically, hoof by hoof, and left enough of him alive to know what’s happening.
Then it runs.
It drops to all fours and bolts down the slope toward the bay, dragging Sinclair with it, his hand still fixed to its shoulder, his ruined body bouncing and tumbling over the rocks, and the stone, and the gorse. I hear him going over the ground, parts of him meeting the rocks with sickening thumps and splats. I run after them and I don’t know why—there is nothing I can do—my legs moving on their own.
“Alasdair!” I scream his real name at the man that’s somewhere inside there, at the white horse racing toward the water. “Alasdair, stop, stop, please—Alasdair!”
My voice goes out over the bay and comes back to me off the far spit, off the castle stone, Alasdair, Alasdair, thinned, and doubled, and useless.
The horse doesn’t stop, hitting the shallows at a gallop, throwing up sheets of silver. It doesn’t slow at the water’s edge the way a real thing would; it goes in like a homing missile. The detective goes in with it, dragged under in a thrashing grey jacket, and blue rope; the last of his voice cut off in a gurgle as the loch closes over his head.